TABLeS FOR. . .1. J UST at present, foreign languages, dialects, and accents have got such a hold on the imagination of night- club entertainers that our native tongue is in danger of disappearing-after dark, at least-and the little linguistic knowl- edge each of us has picked up during the last few years is being flattered all over town At the Ruban Bleu, par exemple, you can hear real Afrikaans and Zulu in the fresh, gay ballads from the veldt sung by Josef Marais, and Miranda, and, later,. French and German double- talk, when Leonard Elliott and Irma Jurist come on with their nonsense songs and operas. At the Blue Angel, John Buck- master delivers a very funny satire in comedy German on English I1Jovies about the war. Jules M unshin, the fel- low in "Call Me Mister" who is now doubling at Café Society U pto.wn, sings ín twelve languages, including some- thing that he claims is Chinese spoken backwards, and at the same place a sort of bahy talk, too, can be heard when Susan Reed, the pale ballad singer and harp strummer with long red curls, murmurs wide-eyed introductions to her conventional Irish lays. And while I'm on the subject, Morton Downey, who is in a different tradition altogether, is missing pure Gaelic by a hair in some of his numbers at the Waldorf. When it comes to garbling foreign languages, my special cornpliments go to Mr. Munshin. He has a long, thin face, whose features, particularly a pair of tremendous, perpendicular eyebrows, seem to have been charcoaled in hy a caricaturist. When he sings or speaks, his arms and every part of his face are in a state of fierce tension, as though he had been storing up for years the ambi- tion to do just what he is doing now. Not all his numbers are first-rate-he's not much better at a grand-opera routine than anybody else, I'm afraid-but one of them, a foolish cowboy song, is worth staying up till midnight to hear. His hoarse Western croak, superim- posed on a natural Third Avenue ac- cent, makes it as entertaining a bit of cornedy as I've listened to in a long time. As for Susan Reed (since we seem to have settled on the show at the uptown Café), I get the impression, either from her elfin grin or from her high, high voice-surely an octave higher than the one-God gave her-that she started life '- 'I. -a TWO Babel as the lady on the White Rock label. Dorothy J arnac follows her with some Agnes de Mille-type dances, but a new twist is provided, in the form of an ac- companIst named Roberta Lee, who su- perbly sings the popular songs and blues that Miss Jarnac acts out. The latter wears a pinafore and old-fashioned rib- bons for her act and is equipped with the bewildered expression and curiously bent legs we've all come to know so well since i "Oklahoma!" opened. I must he getting nervous and run- down, because both ballad sing- ers and bent-legged dancers are beginning to have a de- pressing effect on me. Still, Edrnund Hall's orchestra is on hand, and that alone is enough to make any evening worth while. T HE downtown Café Society is one of the four or five spots in town where you can generally expect to find someone new and good. Right now, however, the show is weaker than it ought to be. Like its brother uptown, it fights its way through a ballad singer and a lady harpist (the Uptown at least combines the two in Susan Reed), and comes to rest at last with Phil Leeds, a comedian without the egotisrn required for his sort of work. I've heard him de- scribed as a young man with a future, but when I saw him, he simply talked interminably, in the manner of a best rnan delivering a long and complicated toast at a bridal table. I could be more charitable, though, if so many of his jokes, especially those in a song about a dead dog, were not in questionable taste. M ORTON DOWNEY'S total rnesmeri- zation of the gathering in the Wedgwood Room on the night that I was there was a rare and impressive thing to watch, if only because the aver- age night-club client, with his mind on his next drink or his last remark, is no- toriously a tough party to mesmerize. :From the moment Downey walked into the spotlight, manipulating his Irish per- sonality, until the moment, ahout an hour later, when he was grudgingly al- lowed to give up and go home, he so be- witched his audience that during his light numbers even a tentative smile on his part provoked a burst of laughter and during the sad or slow ones you could have heard a tip drop on the rug. Since vou can hardly have missed 65 <\', " .. , ,: .. ';'. ,.,.,. ,' ; ',: , " ...' , ", j,,:, .t :: ' Jv':: '" ,..' ä" , ,',.. .:' "',' W , . i:. . " -t" > ' , '" ' '\ t'." ',è: :, .\::':" 1l '. Ift\ "'Y"'.., 1j . ' < \';:11! ,.';;' .... , : oW' " j : ",;'" : " i , :: " ; . " ", : .If I." ì " " í 1. 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